wireless home network

I want to connect my two laptops with a wireless home network. I've gotten to the point where I can see the folder structure of each laptop on the other. But when I try to open any of the folders on the network, it says access is denied, or network location doesn't exist. I set my permissions for sharing everything. I'm confused. One laptop is windows XP professional, and the other is windows vista. XP says access is denied, and vista says the other laptop is online but is blocking connections. I've checked my firewall settings on both laptops and file sharing is listed as an exception on the firewalls of both systems. So I just don't know what the problem is. Please help me???

xp and vista compatablity issue?

Is there a known issue with that? On vista it asked me what system the other computer computer was, including XP. And one selling point of XP professional was that it could do networking. However, the XP system is 32 bit and the vista system is 64 bit. Does that make a difference? I was easily able to share files between them with a LAN cable, but I don't have it anymore, so I'm trying to do this wirelessly, and it seems to be far more difficult.

if it worked before, then i guess the compatability issue is resolved.
i ain't smart in this stuff so i might give bad advise here.
can vista run 32 bit?
could a setting have gotten changed?

If you've checked your firewalls and it work when directly connected, it may not be the computers that are your problem. What kind of router are you using? The security modes may not be configured the same, or maybe you have MAC filtering enabled or the router's firewall is blocking SMB over wireless?

I got it so the pre-set "public" folder could share, but I couldn't get any other folders to share, even when I changed the settings to sharing folders. I'm not sure why that didn't work.